Incompatible SMS tool found - frustration

Avast Mobile Apps Avast Anti-Theft for Android
1

I’m the author of a popular app for android that has just started getting the error message “Incompatible SMS tool found”? from your mobile app.

I see your “FAQ” quotes:
[i]Some apps, like GO SMS Pro or Handcent SMS, take the highest SMS reception priority in the system although Google recommends not to do this. Therefore these apps catch incoming SMS before avast! Anti-Theft can check it for commands. This conflict will very likely cause your avast! Anti-Theft installation to malfunction. This is a serious security risk for our customers.

For the moment we can only recommend to uninstall these apps - and to contact their developers asking for improvement. You can also check our forums at forum.avast.com to find discussions about this topic or contact us at the support page to inform us if you think we display a false positive.

There is also some SMS tools that are officially supported by avast! Anti-Theft:
Chomp SMS
Mighty Text[/i]

From this I find it “interesting” that your own app also takes on the maximum SMS priority which according to yourselves “Google recommends not to do this”.
I then thought maybe Chomp and Mighty Text maybe don’t set this priority, but after investigation they also set the maximum priority.

So I start to think why are they allowed when other apps aren’t. After looking at your app I see you whitelist their apps to allow them through even though they are doing exactly the same as the other apps.

This has left me with a large number of users demanding a fix or requesting refunds.

Taking what you state I would see that you go against google’s recommendations yourself and given that I could also interpret that your app is a “serious security risk for [your] customers”. Should people also be uninstalling your app for doing exactly the same as our app any many others such as Handcent and Go SMS?

Can I request that you make an improvement to your app in the same way you are asking my users to ask me to?

2

Actually we’re not taking highest priority, we take highest priority - 1.
the problem is if someone starts raising, all others have to raise because their tools wont work anymore.
we did not want to acquire highest priority itself, and better warn.
if there is tools who have higher priority, but do not interfere with our app, they can come to us and we’ll check and whitelist them.
we cannot afford losing users because their avast! installation is not working because of this - so we have to warn them.

3

Interesting thought, you can’t afford to loose users, whereas it’s ok for other apps developers to do so?
In my case I’ve updated my app to have a lower priority, but it’d at least be nice if you said which lower priority is required without having to decompile your app. Maybe put it in the faq so when users point developers to it, they are not left in the dark.

4

as we’re a security tool, we need to be first in line, as we need to respond to critical situations. also we do not just block all incoming SMS, but only take those out of the stream that are dedicated to us. there is, for example, some SMS apps who just take ALL SMS out of the queue, and do not forward it to other apps, which breaks ALL other apps.

so our policy is:

  • warn users about high priority apps (we can not differentiate between “good” (forwarding) and “non-good” (blocking) apps)
  • whitelist apps that are proven to work
5

I’m frustrated, too, but not for the same reason. Every SMS messaging app I have tried results in the warning from Avast anti-theft. I see lots of forum messages about SMS message apps that are not compatible, but cannot find any information about which ones ARE compatible. Could someone please post a list of compatible SMS messaging apps? That would be a good topic for the FAQ

Thanks!!!